Can Technical Debt Be Quantified? The Limits And Promise Of The Metaphor
Anyone whose professional life has intersected with the technical debt metaphor knows its power: the simple proposition that such a thing exists opens up a new channel of communication among groups (IT and application developers, designers, biz dev) that famously have trouble communicating about technical decisions. Not everyone understands test cases, aging platforms, crufty code bases, or security loopholes, but everyone understands debt (needless to say, most everyone has personal debt, and a sizable proportion of the news media conversation concerns debts, mortgages, and deficits).